Thursday, December 07, 2006

Behind The Scenes

So that movie from yesterday took a good while to make. It was almost an hour of footage from the handycam, which means it was about 10 Gig of raw data. So when you loaded all that into Movie Maker, the computer had lots of problems (especially since after storing that movie I only had about 10 Gig free on my hard drive). So the first thing I ended up doing was breaking the movie up and saving smaller pieces of it. Once saved as mini movies these pieces were compressed and smaller so the computer didn't thrash memory as much when manipulating them. Then I had to load those pieces back into Movie Maker and start working with the smaller pieces. Once I applied the speed up, the Movie Maker simply could not render a preview of the final product since it was skipping around within the data file too much (the music would play fine, but one frame would be displayed for half a minute instead of seeing multiple frames a second). So the only way I had to preview the movie was to save it to disk. This required a lot of time (about 15 minutes) since I assume it has to redo the algorithm for differences between each frame now that by doubling the speed four times it needed to determine the difference between each frame and the frame 16 spots away. And I suspect that after seeing the finished product there were about four times where I went back and tweaked something during that process, like on the first pass where I didn't mute the audio from the video and you could hear everyone sounding like chipmunks (so all in all I ended up making a version of the movie four times at fifteen minutes each). As for why Noodle and Brick are in there, I only decided to throw them in at the end because once it was all said and done the music was running much longer than the video (and yes, I realize the ending part is kind of slow because of that, which explains why some people may not have even seen Noodle and Brick).

And on an unrelated topic, I see that Blogger 2.0 is pushing full steam with their not so subtle prompts to try and get me to upgrade. Previously they had left me alone because I was part of the Strangers team blog, and since team blogs previously weren't upgradable, members of them were prohibited from upgrading also. But now it looks as if Strangers has transitioned to Blogger 2.0, so for the time being I can't post to Strangers anymore until I upgrade (which is fine since I don't have anything to post at the moment anyway).

5 comments:

Scott said...

I still haven't gotten the invitation to upgrade to Blogger 2.0.

Anonymous said...

2.0 isn't too bad - the biggest problem is that there are two login mechanisms, so when you leave a comment you have to make sure you are logging in with your new 2.0 login and not your old login. And if you do it wrong and it forces you to re-login with the 2.0 login you lose your comment. So now I always copy my comment text before submitting, in case I'm incorrectly logged in.

I'm sure I'm not explaining this very well...

Anonymous said...

Yes, when I upgraded Lollygag it was basically all or nothing. There was no way to deselect Strangers and just upgrade Lollygag.

I took the liberty of upgrading...cause I knew all you folks were tech savvy and I wouldn't have to worry about you....but make sure we keep the Stranger's wave rolling along...it has been a fun ride

hopefully it won't be too much of a pain.

JamesF said...

I'm sure I'm not explaining this very well...

I understood since I've already been bitten by that bug when leaving a comment on your blog (once a blog goes 2.0 so goeth the comment login process).

Anonymous said...

So I wonder why Blogger hasn't extended me an invite to 2.0? I hope I didn't screw it up, because I created a beta login that is tied to my gmail account, but my regular blogger account is obviously not my gmail account. I don't know quite how that transition would work.

I would like to send blogger customer support an email saying, "Hey, can I covert to 2.0 yet?" but they don't have a real customer support mechanism... it seems like it's all done through the message boards, and I refuse to participate in that mess.